Thoughts on Ramadan and other recent news

So I promised that this post would be about Ramadan (which started October 2 and ends today, I think), but as I’ve been thinking about it, the fact that it’s Ramadan isn’t that apparent, at least not to my untrained eye. There are a few things that stick out. People get up early to eat so I sometimes heard an air rifle being shot off at about 5:15am and I saw a few fireworks at night as the fast was being broken. Right now, some one’s setting off a lot of fireworks in the neighborhood, and they’re getting just high enough that I can see them bursting over the rooftops out my living room window. When I was tutoring late at my private student’s house, I would have to wait a few minutes until the family’s driver had broken the fast so that he could take me home.

I have been learning more about Ramadan, though. I’ve learned that it’s a time of purification, generosity, and forgiveness for Muslims. At the end of Ramadan, Muslims celebrate Idul Filtri (known as Lebaran in Indonesia). Giving money is an important part of the celebrating. The wealthy give to the poor. Employers (though not mine) give to their employees. Parents give to their children. What’s interesting to me is the culture conflict that happens in that arena. Many of us gladly contributed to funds for the security guards at my apartment and for the cleaning and security staff at school, but I overheard an Australian coworker complaining about how his paper boy came begging for a Lebaran donation. Walking the line between generosity and handouts is difficult here.

In some ways, the Indonesian celebration of Lebaran resembles the Christmas season in the United States with the emphasis on generosity and family (and increased consumer spending). There’s a mass exodus out of Jakarta for Lebaran as people go home to their towns and villages to celebrate with family. Even though IPEKA is a Christian school, we get a week and a half off for Lebaran, so I’m enjoying easy transit around the city and sleeping past five o’clock until....

My parents and my roommate Megan get here on Sunday! I’m beyond excited. We’re going to Yogyakarta for a couple of days and then they’ll spend a week with me in Jakarta. I’ve been delightfully busy with figuring out details like groceries and linens and who’ll sleep where. Which means that I haven’t been doing as much grading as I should be. I got slammed with 11^th grade papers and then 10^th grade tests and then 11^th grade finals, and I’m still not done. The hard part about giving out an assignment is that I know I’ll have to grade more than a hundred of them. But with my family coming, I’m really motivated to get it all done.

In other teaching news, I’ve been easing into eighth grade, where we’ve started a unit on war. My first class with them kind of devolved into shouting matches of their opinions on war, which was fun, even though it was a little chaotic. They’re definitely different from my 10^th and 11^th grade students, and they have lots of energy. Here’s one thing that’s been cracking me up. One of the problems that we have as English teachers at IPEKA is that students don’t always speak English in class. IPEKA is supposed to be a 100% English school, but it certainly doesn’t work out that way. So, we English teachers try to discourage Bahasa Indonesia in our classes as much as we can. About a month ago, I was thinking about how my high school French teacher made us sing a song in class if we made a certain verb mistake in past tense. Inspired by Mrs. Lattimer, I wrote the following lyrics for Indonesian-speaking infractions.

(Sung to the tune of Alouette)
This is English class where we speak English,
We speak English no matter what the task:
In our groups and to our friendsies
Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Wednesdays
Fridays, too, yes that’s true. Ohhh.
This is English class where we speak English,
We speak English no matter what the task.

Since it was a little late to start it with my 10^th or 11^th graders, I decided that my ditty would have to wait until January, but then eighth grade fell into my lap, and I thought I’d see how it worked. Well, I taught it to them on my first day with them (Monday), and when I saw them again on Friday, I heard little choruses of “This is English class” erupting as I walked down the halls. It made me laugh. I hope it works.

I did something really exciting today, but I want to tell the story with the pictures I took.

Flotsam and jetsam news

The last couple of weeks have been pretty busy, so I apologize to those of you who’ve been waiting with bated breath for my latest report.

The end of my time with my year 11 students kind of snuck up on me. It’s probably because I’ve never ended a school year in September. I had my last regular class with them yesterday, and it didn’t really hit me that I’m done teaching them until one of my classes handed me a little poster with a class picture and their signatures. I laughed a little because more of their comments complimented my looks than my teaching (Nicole Kidman and Annie of “Tomorrow” fame” have joined Barbie on the list of women students have compared me to), but I suppose I’ll appreciate it when years of teaching have made me grumpy and sour. I’ll miss my 11s.

The school calendar is really complicated, and I won’t explain it completely, but basically the year 11 students begin year 12 next month, while the year 10 students won’t move up until January. This means that my schedule for the next few months has a big hole, which will soon be filled by teaching grade 8. And with this newest reshuffling of the schedule, I'll only be teaching 3 days a week, and I’ve been relieved of my grade 7 responsibilities. I’m starting to think that they want me to learn the name of every student in all of junior and senior high.

Sushi and bookstores have been a fun feature of the last couple of weeks. My coworker Tim (he’s a fellow Midwesterner) and I started exploring good sushi places a couple of weeks ago. Some of our Indonesian co-workers know of an all-you-can-eat sushi buffet, so a group of us are going next weekend. I’m pretty excited, even though wasabi and I have a complicated relationship. As a small side note, I’m getting much more proficient with chopsticks. On the subject of bookstores, Tim and I also found an excellent one in a western suburb of Jakarta (Lippo Karawaci) where you can read in egg shaped wicker chairs that hang from the ceiling while looking out the window and sipping “Refreshing Tea” or “Relaxing Tea” from the bookstore’s café. Good bookstores are rare enough in Jakarta, partly because this culture is not much of a reading culture, and the ones I’ve found don’t make leisurely browsing easy. The same area also has a lot of restaurants that look like they’re worth trying. We had some tasty Indian food at one and enjoyed dessert and live music at another.

Last Monday we had a blackout at school. Apparently, random power outages are fairly common in Jakarta. The school is equipped with a generator to deal with it and the light came back on a couple minutes later. It doesn't really surprise me that this city has power problems. Infrastructure is not exactly Jakarta's strength, and a city of 10 million takes up a lot of energy.

Also along environmental lines: yes, this city suffers from air pollution and trash everywhere, but they do have some good ideas. At the grocery store, you buy many liquids and gels in pouches not bottles. For example, I bought hand soap in a bottle the first week I was here, but now that I'm running out, I can just buy a pouch of hand soap, and it cuts down on waste. The same goes for cooking oil and laundry detergent and dishwashing liquid. Packaging in general seems less wasteful here. (Unfortunately, there’s no recycling, and I still cringe a little when I throw away plastic bottles or paper.) Another thing is that there’s no central air conditioning. IPEKA cools classrooms and offices with wall units, but the hallways and the lunchroom don't have AC. Besides cutting down on climate costs, this also means that we can control the temperature of individual classrooms, unlike most American classrooms.

I miss fall. I’ve never had a September without autumn, and it’s hard to believe it’s September without changing leaves and crisp, cool sweater weather.

Last week I found a Walter in my refrigerator. “Holy cow!” I said. He crawled out more slowly than usual and posed for several photos on the side of the fridge while he was warming up.

Topic for next time: Ramadhan

Grocery Shopping

Grocery shopping has never been my favorite thing to do. I always get overwhelmed by possibilities and take way longer than I should. And grocery shopping here is part of that “everything is more complicated and takes longer than it should” feature of living in Jakarta. But here are some interesting features of my grocery shopping.

I shop mostly at two big supermarkets, Carrefour and Hypermart. They sell other stuff beside food, so they’re kind of like a Walmart or a Target but only kind of. When I arrived at Carrefour the other day, there was a promotional tent outside where this was happening. Yes, those are children in oversized plastic balls rolling around like hamsters in an inflatable pool filled with water. I couldn’t stop laughing, and I really needed to share it with someone.

Carrefour has a garage on the first floor so you have to take this moving ramp up to the second floor. They magnetize the cart wheels so that they don’t slide down. At first glance, Carrefour looks pretty much like a grocery store in the U.S.

There are some differences, though. For one thing, there are a lot more store employees. Labor is very cheap in Indonesia, so at times there are more employees than customers in an aisle. Sometimes they thrust products at me or try to get me to sample something. There’s always someone mopping the floor. Actually, that’s true almost everywhere I go—school, mall, grocery shopping. Floors and windows really do need to be cleaned often (pollution brings in a lot of grime), but sometimes I think employees just need something to do. Other grocery store differences: eggs aren’t refrigerated, there’s a whole aisle of powdered milk, bread pretty much only comes in white, and when there’s a problem at the register (at least at Carrefour), they wave a flag until someone come to help.

My favorite product that I've seen recently was in a Indian grocery store which I visited with my Indian neighbor from across the hall (he and his wife are also IPEKA teachers). Sorry for the blur, but it says "World's No. 1 Fairness Cream for Men." For a white person who cannot tan to save her life, this looks very funny.

The story of this week is me starting to fall in love with fruit here. I started with familiar fruits, bananas and apples and oranges and grapes, but I’ve been branching out. I discovered pink guava juice a few weeks ago, and I’m pretty much addicted to it now. My exciting discovery this week was that guava naturally prevents or cures dengue fever (a nasty virus transmitted by mosquitoes). I love it when I’m smarter than I think I am. I also tried fresh guava, pink and white, for the first time. If you haven’t tried it, it’s a green fruit about the size of a small apple or orange, and you wash it and cut off the top and bottom and bite it and it’s juicy and fleshy and it can have some small seeds, but overall delicious. I also found some excellent mangoes this week, some at a fruit stall near my apartment (thankfully, I had an Indonesian friend to translate), and some at Hypermart. Mangga is Indonesian for mango, and they’re fabulous here. I'm also learning to cut up a mango successfully, but give me a little more time to practice.

I have one more piece of grocery news, though it’s not really my grocery news. On the way to church last week, we saw this motorbike. Those chickens are alive (or were). I hope they enjoyed the ride.